Posted by JonAs you might be able to tell from my recent post about the movie ‘Ratatouille’, food – the procurement, cooking and consuming thereof – is one of my abiding passions. Before my recent trip to Singapore, I therefore invested a fair amount of time researching the city’s dining options.​Hawker centres, it seemed, are the city’s culinary hotbed – collections of independent stalls, each specialising in a particular dish or two. The Lobby, Starwood hotels’ blog, passed on an interesting perspective:

Singapore’s Ministry of Health rates restaurants on an A-D scale not on their quality but on their cleanliness. Oddly, the rating you want to watch for is C, not A, according to Serious Eats.​“Here’s the local logic: Being generally one-man outfits, if the hawker’s food were any good, he would be flat out busy taking orders, cooking, serving, collecting payment, and doling out change. Where would he find time to clean the stall to the obsessively nit-picky standards of a government official? Therefore, only nonpopular stalls with sub-par food would be able to earn an A or B grade.”

​I was struck by the similarity with many proposal centres. Particularly in larger organisations, it’s not uncommon to find immensely detailed, finely-tuned bid and proposal processes. The governance model will be clearly defined; a barrage of reviews will take place (with teams variously red, blue, orange and more); there’ll be formal project management mechanisms and communications plans. Staff are trained to follow each step religiously; cohorts of administrators schedule the necessary meetings.

But the resulting proposals are dreadful – mediocre, dull, merely ‘complete and compliant’ rather than ’superbly articulating a compelling story’. There’s no spark, no flair, no creativity; no burning desire to produce truly first-class output, no originality, no passion.

It’s almost as if they’re the Singaporean ‘category A’ stalls – sterile environments, creating dull output, providing customers with a mundane solution. They’re so absorbed in the internal process that they forget to look outward, to the customer and the competition, forgetting the very purpose of the proposal centre’s existence as they do.

I LOVE your analogy. Love it. But I’m fearful of the overall message. While we will just have to trust Serious Eats on the correct interpretation of the grading system for Singapore, I know that a LACK of process can sap the energy out of vibrant teams (of all sizes) just as much as an overly complex process can. Certainly large proposal teams with complicated processes have also turned out some awesome proposals, no?

And I hate to admit this, but I know from personal experience that even small teams — or, in my case, a single writer — with a lot of excitement can turn out merely ‘complete and compliant’ responses! But I believe in process, and the better I get at following ours, the higher the quality of my output. Should we burn the operating handbook in the flames of passion?

Reply

Jon

3/26/2016 04:49:08 am

Hi, Jeff

I’m not sure we disagree at all! I’m certainly not arguing that organisations shouldn’t have processes in place, clearly defined, with all who sail in them duly trained. And we’ve helped lots of clients out there to develop some really neat process handbooks and toolkits, with lots of checklists to use at the right point of the bid.

My concerns are when proposal managers become slaves to the process, tied to a large and detailed operating manual (”you must fill in every box on every checklist”) – rather than using well-thought-through processes nimbly, to support sensible, pragmatic decision-making on each proposal effort. It’s about ensuring consistency – at the same time as giving the proposal manager the chance to do the creative things that are needed to make this proposal team buzz for this proposal effort to this customer.

And I also get worried when processes focus too much on internal governance to the detriment of producing a first-class proposal. I often see process manuals that revolve almost exclusively on the ‘risk should we win’ – to the detriment of ‘what we can do to win’. And I also observe far too many proposal managers spending hours on end filling in internal checklists to the extent that “I really don’t have time to look at the proposal itself today”.

There needs to be a balance – appropriate governance, yet not some complex bureaucratic edifice standing in the way of effective strategy development and content design, value-adding peer review, and so on.

Reply

BJ

3/26/2016 04:49:19 am

The Process shall set you free!

Great analogy, great discussion and it would appear you two are in violent agreement.

My two cents (ok, maybe the whole nickel!) -

As I’ve said many times, it’s the process that will allow you to do great things. And the analogy I use is that of the ‘rules of the road’ when driving.

On most any US highway with a posted speed of 55, you could, assuming you had the necessary driving skills and vehicle, travel at speeds in excess of 100mph fairly safely (as in the event of an emergency such as getting someone to the hospital.)

We can do this because there’s a process and we expect most of the drivers to adhere to the guidleines (granted, someplaces – Mass. comes to mind – this might not be quite ‘most’ of the drivers). Drivers don’t, for the most part, change lanes on a whim, stop in the left hand lane, etc. The actions of the other drivers are fairly predictable.

Now, imagine if there were no rules. How fast could you go? It’s probably safe to say the highway would immediately become grid locked and no one would be moving at all.

So yes, we need process. And as pointed out in the discussion, this needs to be the right amount. Not too much, not too little. And as Jeff would tell you, you need to know when and how to NOT follow the process something to get things done :-)